With the unemployment rate close to 10 percent, is it really a good idea for the Obama Administration to be "sending a sharp warning to employers nationwide?"

The lawsuit, an unusual intervention by the federal government on the issue, comes amid rising concerns that employers are denying jobs to applicants with damaged credit histories, even in cases where creditworthiness does not appear to be directly relevant to the job...

Private and government surveys have suggested that about half of all employers use credit histories in at least some hiring decisions.

Justine Lisser, an E.E.O.C. spokeswoman, said that credit histories were often inaccurate and might not be a good indicator of a person’s qualifications for a particular job. “Credit histories were not compiled to show responsibility,” she said. “They were compiled to show whether or not someone was paying the bills, which is not always the same thing.”

In the E.E.O.C.’s suit, which was filed in federal district court in Cleveland, the agency said that since at least January 2008, Kaplan had rejected job applicants based on their credit history, with a “significant disparate impact” on blacks.

“This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity,” the commission said. The agency did not specify what types of jobs were involved.

... The company added that it typically conducted background checks on all prospective employees. “The checks are job-related and a necessity for our organization to ensure that staff handling financial matters, including financial aid, are properly screened,” Kaplan said. Kaplan and other for-profit education companies have come under intense scrutiny from the federal government because of concerns that the industry leaves too many students unable to repay large federally backed education loans, while providing them with little help in finding jobs. The Department of Education has proposed regulations that would cut off federal financing to for-profit education companies whose graduates have high debt-to-income ratios and low repayment rates.

Let me see if I understand this: One part of the Obama Administration says that some of what Kaplan does borders on being a scam (which seems pretty plausible); meanwhile, another part of the Obama Administration demands that Kaplan hire people who on average have worse track records of untrustworthiness.

Sounds like a plan to me!

The bigger issue is not Kaplan, of course, but the Obama Administration choosing to make it riskier to hire Americans (instead of outsourcing or insourcing to illegal aliens less likely to sue). Obviously, taking away a tool that firms find profit-making in hiring just discourages hiring; yet, I don't think that's obvious to many people these days when it comes to race, where we've all been taught to shut our brains off and just point fingers at bad people.

The federal lawsuit is seeking a permanent injunction to stop Kaplan’s use of credit histories in hiring and other employment decisions. The agency is also seeking lost wages and benefits for people who were not hired because of Kaplan’s use of credit reports to screen applicants, and it wants Kaplan to make employment offers to those individuals.

Michael J. Zimmer, a professor of employment law at Loyola University in Chicago, said that, under federal law, “if an employment practice has a disparate impact on a certain race, you have a case.” He said that the E.E.O.C. would not have brought the case unless it had reviewed statistics about Kaplan’s hiring.

“I think the issue is going to boil down to whether it’s justified as job-related and necessary for business,” he said. “That’s the defense’s standard in a disparate impact case.”

As I said last month in VDARE, the most obvious area where Obama could use his political capital to boost hiring is by declaring victory in the war on discrimination:

... Obama could announce that his election as President shows that the civil rights war is officially over and it’s time to reap the peace dividend: the federal government can dramatically cut back its persecutions of employers for race-related reasons.

Nothing the President could do with a stroke of his pen would do more to cut unemployment by making it legally safer to hire Americans than Obama announcing that, between now and the 50th anniversary of the Civil Rights Act in 2014, he will lay off most of Equal Employment Opportunity Commission bureaucrats and other federal racial inquisitors.

And the business climate would be immediately improved by Obama abolishing the EEOC’s innumerate “Four Fifths Rule.”

Sure, if Obama declared victory on civil rights, his base would howl. But, that's pretty much how you accomplish something as President: by stabbing your supporters in the back.

Conversely, could a President Haley Barbour abolish the Four Fifths Rule in 2013? Of course not, he'd have to boost pointless enforcement to show he's on the side of the angels.

But Obama actually has an opportunity here for statesmanship, which he's, so far, failing utterly to seize, and public affairs discourse is so braindead over anything approaching race that nobody even notices his chance.

48 comments:

Ironically speaking, what if I am being discriminated against for having a good credit score? After all, if I am not shackled by debt and dependent on regular paychecks, why should I counted as a loyal, reliable employee?

My view from South Africa is that Obama is conducting plain identity politics, i.e. what's good for blacks and bad for whites gets done, period.

A white person conducting this sort of politics would be labeled a Jim-Crow or Apartheid racist.

This type of nepotism does really smell bad, here in South Africa there are so many blacks who have traveled on the white tax-payer extorted gravy train. Their fancy wives cannot even drive their BMW's and Mercedes on the right side of the road!

Kaplan needs to recruit lots of fairly smart people on a short-term basis. So it's interesting that they rely so heavily on FICA scores. I guess it correlates with IQ and is a lot cheaper to determine. If the lawsuit is successful, they probably will have to administer some sort of IQ test as a replacement, since clearly tutor (unlike say, fireman) is one of those professions where being smart is actually part of the job. Either way they're going to have disparate impact.

Kaplan is owned by the Washington Post. The stock fell 2% yesterday according to the article. Makes you wonder a purportedly friendly paper is being sued by the Obama administration. Something tells me this will be settled out of court.

How many blacks are using the services of Kaplan? My guess is that their bread and butter are white and asian parents who want to place their kids in the best colleges they can followed by foreign students that are trying to round out their education to transfer degrees from foreign countries. If Kaplan was educating black children to go to college, not only would it be a miracle, but it take the target off of their forehead.

Wow, I never realized the FICO Score can bne used in lieu of a standardized test. But come to think of it, it does make sense. It does take a little bit of brain to not be conned by all the fine prints that these businesses and banks will throw up.

But if we cannot check our employees with either tests or FICO Scores, then how can we know if we are hiring competent employees?

Which is pretty funny, really. Kaplan Test Prep is one of the few companies on the planet that can require a virtual IQ score for hiring--and does. To get hired as a test prep instructor, you have to prove you have scored in the top 2% on at least one standardized test. Kaplan has almost no black or Hispanic test prep instructors. No one seems to care--at least, there's never been a lawsuit that I've heard of. But then, test prep is lousy pay and relatively low status--the ultimate job for the oversupply of smart unambitious white folks (raises hand).

So it's extremely rich to see another branch of Kaplan, one that doesn't use IQ or a proxy, getting sued for disparate impact in an entirely different direction. And you have to wonder--surely it's not the only company doing credit checks? Why pick on Kaplan? I wondered if maybe it was payback for their IQ testing, which they can't get at. Or maybe it's the for-profit blowback.

Going after Kaplan also allows Obama to do a solid for his buddies in the older more traditional diploma mills, who crank out equally worthless humanities degrees.

Really, you can't expect Obama to take some dramatic "Nixon goes to China" move right now on civil rights. The only guarantee he has against a primary challenger is his black base. That is, someone like Hillary Clinton won't challenge Obama because they know that if they unseat him in the primaries, the black vote won't come out for them in November. If Obama did what you're suggesting here, then he'd lose that backstop.

Where Obama could play to the right is with immigration. Blacks are nativist in inclination. He'd lose a bit of Hispanic enthusiasm, but as you've pointed out, Steve, that would be made up in white votes.

Anyone over age 45 or 50 and out of work today in this economy knows the reality: Companies are now so blatantly practicing age discrimination that you'll probably never work again -- at least in anything approaching your previous capacity. It is sufficiently widespread that some HR managers at large corps now even feel comfortable enough to admit it in the media, with no fear of consequences. The very same federal law that prohibits racial discrimination in hiring also prohibits discrimination based on age. Yet, the Obama administration shows no inclination toward investigating large companies which, after recent years of layoffs, now have virtually no employees over 50 and, as rehiring ensues, openly admit that nobody over 40 will be considered. Why is the Obama administration so uninterested in THIS brand of discrimination? Just think about who's mostly being impacted: The white, the male.

Do a little thought experiment. Imagine what the United States would be like without blacks and Hispanics. Would the trains run on time? Probably. Now imagine what the US would be like without whites. Yup, it would be just another third world trading partner of Europe and China with almost all development restricted to the coasts.

Actually (dare I say this) the United States would probably be a much better country without the waves of immigrants who came in the 19th century, including the Irish, who seem to have invented welfare and big time criminal corruption in city government, and Jews, who have taken over the banking system and economically run our country into the ground, and enforced a reign of PC terror in the universities. So much of liberalism in educated American whites is just the Stockholm Syndrome developed in college and graduate school.

Off topic: I just watched Cliff Van Zandt (former FBI criminal profiler) on MSNBC discussing the "philadelphia strangler" case. The suspect is black; all victims white. The killings are noteworthy (even by serial killer/rapist standards) by their brutality. Van Zandt did address that this suggests a special hatred for the victim group: identified by him and news barbie as "drug users" and "prostitutes." However, no mention was made of the race of the victims: all white. Despite the fact that motivation WAS lightly touched upon. Can we have a national conversation about this? Please How about some thoughts, Steve?

Hiring based on credit histories is bullshit. How much you borrow has a huge impact on your credit score -- the optimal way to raise it is to borrow a lot and pay back a lot. If you don't borrow much, one or two legit disputes will sink your score, if you borrow a lot, it won't. Not to mention how hard it is to correct for errors.

Which, if you look around, your eyes will tell that. WY has the least-bad economy in the nation in this, the Great Recession. Our employment rate has remained around 6%. Our state gov't budget has varied between huge surplus and slight deficit. We have had no Mortgage Meltdown, as our people never got caught up in Housing Bubble Mania.

Our school system in Central WY has the least-stressed budget in the nation.

Jobs, while not as plentiful as they were when oil first crossed $100 / barrel, are available, houses are selling and have been all along.

So, what's the common denominator between having a good economy and the highest rate of young people who are AFQT- qualified?

"Kaplan revenue overall in the third quarter rose to $743.3 million, up 9 percent over the same period a year earlier, and profits more than doubled. Kaplan accounted for 62 percent of the entire company's revenue and 75 percent of its operating income.

Ariel Sokol, the UBS analyst, had cited concerns that Kaplan could find itself in violation of the Education Department rules that limit for-profit schools from getting more than 90 percent of their tuition receipts from a government-lending program for students. In 2009, Kaplan Higher Education received 83 percent of its revenue from the program, known as Title IV

Ariel Sokol, the UBS analyst, had cited concerns that Kaplan could find itself in violation of the Education Department rules that limit for-profit schools from getting more than 90 percent of their tuition receipts from a government-lending program for students. In 2009, Kaplan Higher Education received 83 percent of its revenue from the program, known as Title IV.

In testimony in U.S. District Court, Bennie Wilcox, a former dean of law and legal studies at Kaplan University, said he witnessed Kaplan executives commit 'multiple schemes' to defraud the U.S. government and taxpayers out of $1 billion. Kaplan denies the allegations. . . Florida is investigating Kaplan Inc. and four other for- profit colleges for possible misrepresentations about their financial aid, recruitment and accreditation."

If the Feds succeed in knocking out Kaplan it will probably sink The Washington Post.

headache:My view from South Africa is that Obama is conducting plain identity politics, i.e. what's good for blacks and bad for whites gets done, period. A white person conducting this sort of politics would be labeled a Jim-Crow or Apartheid racist...

Spengler, at the Asia Times, drawing [in this case] on Steve Sailer's work, was the only commentator to really peg Obama prior to the election:

...That is what I meant by asserting last February that Barack Obama hates America (Obama's women reveal his secret Asia Times Online, Feb 26, 2008) . Recently, blogger Steve Sailer called attention to a passage in Obama's book Dreams of My Father that explains the source of this hatred...

I suspect Obama and the EEOC are hounding Kaplan because people in the private- school[1] business are in the best position to point out the Emperor's nudity (that is, point out the foolishness of current liberal racial dogma).

Obama and his thugs want to get in the first lick, since popular and legislative backlash against current excesses in the "ed sector" is liable to prompt some fingerpointing-- and some school administrator might be tempted to point out how much money and effort are wasted on the manifestly unqualified "diverse" NAM's who drag down nearly every school's "placement" (and student-loan-payback) statistics.

Obama and his gang want to terrify private-school managers into silence (they already have the public-school admins by the balls). The Obama thugs also wish to pack private-school staffs with chip-on-the-shoulder NAM dimwits who will intimidate the more capable staffers into silence and serve as an early-warning network for the EEOC and other political-enforcement agencies.

Trawling through a firm's HR records to build a statistical case like EEOC seems to have done with Kaplan is such a bore. It's much easier to have a steady stream of racism accusations coming in from people who resent the way their hired-on-merit colleagues end up with most of the important assignments.

[1] Of course "private" schools are mostly rent-seekers who live off "student loan" money supplied by the government.

“This practice has an unlawful discriminatory impact because of race and is neither job-related nor justified by business necessity,” the commission said.

I love how a government official is saying about a private firm that their hiring processes are neither job-related nor justified by business necessity. How in the heck would they even know? Have they ever run a business, or more specifically, have they ever run a similar business to Kaplan?

Let the market decide. If Kaplan's employees are substandard they will go out of business unless they change. If Kaplan is succeeding in the market place with their current employees, then they are making the right decisions.

This thought process from a government official about business necessity is laughable given the performance of central governments the world over who have thought they could run a nation and ended up running it into the ground.

Obama is a small time race hustler elected President. What about him prompted anyone to think he would ever be different? Other than rhetoric there is little difference from Obama and say, President Louis Farrakhan.

He's using the EPA to conduct war on "carbon emissions" and picking a fight with Congress over how much people should pay for their gas and electricity bills in a recession.

Meanwhile his ability to get relected hinges basically on one thing: the employment rate. He had a meet-and-greet with business leaders, and thinks this "fixed" his problem with employment, along with Bernanke dumping dollars from his helicopter.

Obama is S-T-U-P-I-D. Even Bill Clinton could figure out he could grab all the interns he wanted, if he just kept wages/employment high.

Obama's Presidency is going to resemble one giant Jihadi moment "Allhu Akbar!" and then the explosion.

Obama's never going to reduce affirmative action; every indication I've seen shows that he's a true believer. If anything, he'll greatly increase affirmative action. It would be great for him to reduce affirmative action, but it's just not going to happen.

In a serious echo of that old joke about the white valedictorian of the afrocentric studies class, why not make the employment test a rigorous test on black and latino culture, using critical reading passages from leading black and chicano studies professors. I'm confident Steve would perform well on such a test.

In seriousness, credit score seems to me to signal conscientiousness, which I think is probably often more valuable in an employee than a very high IQ. For a lot of stuff, you want the person with the neat room that shows up on time, not the guy with the stain on his shirt who makes your client feel dumb.

"In a serious echo of that old joke about the white valedictorian of the afrocentric studies class, why not make the employment test a rigorous test on black and latino culture, using critical reading passages from leading black and chicano studies professors. I'm confident Steve would perform well on such a test."

Or everyone might up doing equally badly. Here is an excerpt from the "Wise Latina" speech:

"However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others [clumsy]. Other [sic] simply do not care. Hence, one must accept the proposition that a difference there will be by [huh?] the presence of women and people of color on the bench. Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see. My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them [we are expecting “it” here] further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference [which “difference?” there is no immediate antecedent for “that”] will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some [“some” what?] based on my gender and my Latina heritage."

"the most obvious area where Obama could use his political capital to boost hiring is by declaring victory in the war on discrimination"

I cannot imagine this happening. One lesson I took away from the excellent "Half Blood Prince" book was that "anti-racism" is the only thing that Obama really cares about, the only thing that really gets his blood pumping (the task of fixing the economy sure doesn't seem to get much of a rise out of him, neither do dealing effectively with foreign policy or capping oil spills).

Martin Luther did not repudiate the reformation in 1521. And Vladimir Lenin never used his golden chance in 1917 to repudiate Communism.

president barbicane said..."Obama's never going to reduce affirmative action; every indication I've seen shows that he's a true believer. If anything, he'll greatly increase affirmative action. It would be great for him to reduce affirmative action, but it's just not going to happen."

The WSJ for what it is worth has been covering the battle between the shorts on private Ed companies, along with the Obama Admin., Dems, and teachers unions, and the private ed companies.

The Private Ed companies are dismayed to find themselves political targets for destruction, as they are strategic threats to the teachers unions, Dems, Affirmative Action, and the current University System that tiers educational access on Elite/Moneyed status (Harvard, Yale) or Affirmative Action blocking pieces.

Let me add on Wyoming: impressive scores considering that there are considerable Indian Reservations there. Whitopia seems to be parts of the Mountain West that Mexicans don't want.

"However, to understand takes time and effort, something that not all people are willing to give. For others, their experiences limit their ability to understand the experiences of others [clumsy]. Other [sic] simply do not care.

Obviously, she's unqualified, but I have to call bullshit on this. This is a speech. The words you are quoting were written by someone else. There is no way in hell she said, "Other [sic] simply do not care." There's about a 99.9999% chance that she said "others", and the transcriber made a mistake.

"if an employment practice has a disparate impact on a certain race, you have a case.”

Impossible.

There can be no law against disparate racial impact.

If doing something has a disparate racial impact, then failing to do it has a disparate racial impact as well. The only way to address such disparate impact is to adopt a policy of straightforward racial favoritism.

"The bigger issue is not Kaplan, of course, but the Obama Administration choosing to make it riskier to hire Americans (instead of outsourcing or insourcing to illegal aliens less likely to sue). Obviously, taking away a tool that firms find profit-making in hiring just discourages hiring; yet, I don't think that's obvious to many people these days when it comes to race, where we've all been taught to shut our brains off and just point fingers at bad people."

I'm not sure I see it this way. It seems that employers have all kinds of excuses not to hire people that weren't there a generation ago. They are hell bent on outsourcing jobs and insourcing employees anyway. Maybe this will allow a few more Americans to get hired who wouldn't have otherwise.

"Let me add on Wyoming: impressive scores considering that there are considerable Indian Reservations there. Whitopia seems to be parts of the Mountain West that Mexicans don't want."

Thank you. As a repatriated Wyomingite, I'll accept your compliment on behalf of the rest of us in the Cowboy State.

Actually, the Indians (Shoshone and Arapaho) only comprise 3% of our population. They are not much bother except for the burden they put on Fremont County for social services for their alcoholism. Their population is barely replacement level, and many of them just stay on the reservation. I don't know why being welfare recipients as they are has not resulted in their population exploding as it has among Blacks and Mexican mestizos. The Amerinds suffer terrible depression and teen suicide rates. So, the Amerinds are a bearable burden.

But, the Mexican mestizos don't want to be in WY???? Huh. The residents of Jackson Hole and Laramie would disagree. You can't spit without hitting one.

Still, they ARE concentrated in Jackson Hole and Laramie, and their percent of pop at 6% has not reached CA levels -- at least yet.Hopefully the wake-up about the imminvasion that is occuring, as demonstrated by the AZ recent revolt, will allow us White Wyomingites to gin up and toss out the illegals before they get too entrenched.

>If doing something has a disparate racial impact, then failing to do it has a disparate racial impact as well. The only way to address such disparate impact is to adopt a policy of straightforward racial favoritism.<

There you go again with that logic stuff. It's clear you will never hold any office of profit and honor in the United States government.

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